Adding a homeless shelter and outreach centers

I’m relatively new to editing OSM but I’ve always been a huge fan of the effort so I’m making an effort to help out.

I was thinking about adding POIs in my town for all the current homeless shelters and outreach centers. Some of these have religious affiliations, some don’t. What POI symbol should be used?

I hunted around and found the POI types from Garmin:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin/POI_Types

but nothing jumped out beyond the Community Center. There is a shelter POI:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Dshelter

but this seems specific to hiking.

What’s the right way to capture the fact that a structure is for the homeless or others in need of shelter or food?

Thanks

Sean

You seem to be mixing up Garmin POI types and OSM POIs. Primarily, you should be using OSM POIs as listed here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_Features

There doesn’t seem to be an appropriate tag for homeless shelters and outreach centres. A quick look at http://tagwatch.stoecker.eu/Planet-100728/En/tags.html doesn’t provide much help either.

You may want to propose a new tag on http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features and combine this with a quick email to the OSM tagging mailing list to see if anyone has already started this. http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging

Thanks for the pointers. I was hoping that Garmin might have something as a baseline that could be ported to OSM.

The Proposed features wiki has a lot of great details on how to request changes, excellent work. I’ll take a look at the mailing list and see if a new request will be necessary.

Thanks for the help.

Sean